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Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up
- To: kenner at vlsi1 dot ultra dot nyu dot edu, mark at codesourcery dot com
- Subject: Re: Beyond GCC 3.0: Summing Up
- From: dewar at gnat dot com
- Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 07:49:09 -0400 (EDT)
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
<<The far trickier issue is latent bugs and, for me, the main reason is
that the knowlege needed to fix it is usually very different from that
needed for the original patch and it isn't reasonable to require
contributors to have that knowlege.
>>
Exactly true, which is why someone, or more accurately some decision
process, is required to deal with this situation, and to decide between
three courses of action:
1. Leave the status quo, the new breakage simply becomes a new bug to be
fixed sometime in the future, but is not serious enough to get too worried
about.
2. Make sure that the breakage gets fixed by making sure that someone will
work on the ix.
3. Revert the patch, because neither 1 nor 2 is practical.
No one thinks that 3 is a route that should be taken casually, it should
be unusual to ever have to revert a patch, but there needs to be some
process to decide between these three courses of action.